Waiting to forgive

Kelly Dame, Hearst Newspapers

Published 7:00 pm, Sunday, December 19, 2010

MIDLAND — The McRoberts family is waiting — as they have for the last 19 years — to face and forgive the person who accidentally took the life of Greg McRoberts; a son, brother, father and now, grandfather.

Greg was 24 years old when he disappeared on Dec. 12, 1991. His family and sheriff’s deputies searched for him until his body was found by a pedestrian at the bottom of a brushy ditch along South Meridian Road on Jan. 4, 1992, less than half a mile from where he was last seen.

Since Greg’s death, time has marched on for his family. There have been marriages and births, illnesses and moves.

There also has been one anonymous letter from the person who claims to be the driver of the vehicle that hit him.

“It baffled me,” Greg’s mother, Deanna McRoberts, said of receiving and reading the letter. “I was kind of in shock.”

The Letter

The two-page, typed letter is dated March 22, 2005. In it, the writer confesses to being the driver of the vehicle that hit and killed Greg, apologizes, and tells what occurred.

The letter states the vehicle was headed south and Greg was bicycling north, and the driver was unable to avoid him. After the collision, the driver panicked and left.

“I counted on the cars behind me stopping and helping him,” the driver wrote, later adding the news that Greg died was delivered a month later by a neighbor.

It also contains clues to the driver’s identity. The Midland County Sheriff’s Office announced those clues in 2006 — that the driver has experienced a divorce, suffered depression, been addicted to drugs and alcohol, participated in a 12-step program, become a born-again Christian and been on a fishing trip to Minnesota — without releasing the letter itself until now.

It is among a plethora of evidence in the case, which is in the careful yet determined hands of Det. Brent Benzing.

“The original investigators did a significant amount of work,” Benzing said, adding they established a foundation that he’s further mined. The information and evidence they collected, combined with new technology and evaluation from experts around the world has led to new witnesses and more evidence. The case file has blossomed from a slender folder to multiple volumes of documents.

The letter gives much more insight into the case than was released four years ago, including that the driver could be a local resident and that some information about what happened to Greg has been shared with another person.

“We do in fact believe this person suffers a tremendous amount of guilt … and has shared this experience with someone else,” Benzing said, adding the conversation might have included just enough of the details for the other person to recognize the accident.

Those beliefs are supported by the letter, in which the driver writes about the inescapable lifelong feelings of guilt and sadness about what happened.

“Something inside of me also (I) died knowing what had happened and the pain that I had caused. To leave a son, wife and children alone is an unthinkably painful realization,” the driver wrote.

Family

The hurt of not knowing what happened to Greg for so long, then receiving the letter but still wondering who was behind the wheel has taken its toll on the family.

Deanna said the holidays — when she looks forward to family but is very aware that one person who should be there isn’t — are a difficult time.

“It’s just this time of year, bringing it all up again is kind of rough,” she said.

She chronicled just some of the things her son missed out on, including the marriage of his daughter, Teigha Fishel, now age 20, and the birth of her first child this summer.

“He would be so proud of me,” Teigha said of her dad. She was only 15 months old when he died. Her grief of being raised without her father has grown with the birth of her own son, who won’t know either of his grandfathers since her father-in-law recently died.

Knowing what happened to her own father would give her and the rest of the McRoberts family peace.

“It would be a great weight lifted off everyone’s shoulders,” Teigha said.

Amy Miehlke, Teigha’s mother, also is waiting for closure. Right now, she’s most upset that Greg is missing out on his grandbaby.

“Another generation and grandpa’s not here to see him,” she said. “It’s hard, it’s her first child.”

Seeing the letter revisited the pain, and brought new questions to the table.

“When I read the letter, just a few months ago, it kind of shocked me. I didn’t expect what it said,” Teigha recalled. “If they could come forward, I could ask them why did you just go away?” She is searching for a clearer picture of what happened to her father that night, both for herself and so she can explain it to her son.

Greg’s son, Greg Jr., is now 18 years old. He also recently read the letter for the first time.

“It kinda gave me an image of what happened,” but didn’t tell him everything he and the rest of the family need to know, Greg Jr. said.

“I think the person is sorry and wants forgiveness,” Amy said. “If they wanted it that much, they’d have put their name on it … I just wish they would come forward.”

Forgiveness

In a Jan. 12, 1992, Daily News article, Greg’s father, Richard McRoberts, already had faced the idea of not knowing for the rest of his life who struck his son, and asked the driver to step forward to explain what happened. “I’m not out for revenge, I’m out for answers,” he said then.

In the years since, his intent has not wavered.

“Twenty years later, you lose that wanting to get even,” he said. “You lose that, and you want to get it resolved.”

Amy, who was left pregnant with Greg’s second child and caring for Teigha on her own, is still trying to let go of her anger about his death.

She said the letter feels like a slap in the face, a reminder that someone out there knows who was driving the vehicle that hit Greg. It also is proof that the driver feels pain about what occurred.

“I actually feel sorry for this person … The guilt is eating them up,” she said, adding finding the driver would be the best Christmas gift ever for Greg’s family.

“The effect of this incident has taken a tremendous toll on not only their emotional welfare but also their physical well being,” Benzing said of the family. “I would not be able to imagine the emotional impact of walking into a crowded room and always wondering if that’s the person.”

“We really need some solace for this family,” he said, adding only the person responsible can do that.

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